About
Hello and greetings. My name is Timothy Hawes, but I go by Tim most of the time. I have been working with Linux since 1996. First started with Slackware Linux distribution, then moved on to Debian that same year, and eventually tried all the major distributions including SuSE, TurboLinux, and RedHat.
I became Comptia Linux+ certified in 2004, when I needed to teach the same certification class. I studied and passed the exam with flying colors within 48 hours, and then started teaching the course the next day. Almost all of my students passed their exams on the first try.
I have been working with CentOS and Ubuntu Linux, since then.
Luboš Průša said,
December 7, 2010 at 11:54 am
Hello, I am very interested in your OpenBibleDB project, because I wanted to make a literal translation of the Bible to the Czech language. I don’t want to repeat work done already by others – so I am searching for some English literal or concordant translations of the Bible, Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament including Strong’s numbers and dictionary imported into a MySQL database – just the same what you do.
Is it possible to get from you some already converted MySQL or PostgreSQL databases?
Thanks
L. Průša
Tim Hawes said,
December 7, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Everything is still pretty much in alpha state. I have not been able to work on this project since last spring.
The data files I am using for the database can be found at the Sword project website here: http://crosswire.org/sword/modules/ModDisp.jsp?modType=Bibles
You’ll need to install the full Sword suite, easier done on Linux, and use the mod2osis program to convert a Bible module to XML. Then check out my project using svn (instructions for this are here: http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=313068) and follow the instructions in the README.
I don’t want to deter your efforts, I have no idea what state the Czech Bible is in, but English literal translations, unfortunately, are not too literal (this is particularly true of the Old Testament). The most literal English translations still translate “ascension offering” as “burnt offering” and “tribute offering” as “cereal offering”. The best thing to do is to translate from the original Greek and Hebrew.
Luboš Průša said,
December 8, 2010 at 9:20 am
I followed up your instructions – but it wasn’t a work for a newbie.
In your README are almost no instructions – you didn’t mention, what MySQL database (bibledb1) and user (webuser with no password) should be first created – I had to search in your python script. You didn’t mention which SQL scripts should be executed/imported and in which order (firstly file OpenBibleDB.sql, then init.sql) to initialize the data structure. Even after that the conversion/import to MySQL of KJV bible failed, so I tried following changes to the database:
ALTER TABLE `books` CHANGE `id` `id` INT( 10 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT
ALTER TABLE `books` CHANGE `bookref` `bookref` VARCHAR( 20 ) NOT NULL
and it worked (but unfortunatelly for KJV only – other Bibles failed with some SQL syntax error).
I would recommend (if you wish to continue this project):
to write a better readme;
to include AUTO_INCREMENT change on table `books`;
to join OpenBibleDB.sql init.sql files into one, e.g. OpenBibleDB_init.sql;
to rewrite your python script parsexml.py to produce SQL output (not directly execute SQL query, but only write it down to the output) for better development – because my efforts ended with some SQL syntax error, but I wasn’t able to see the problematic SQL query – many users are then able to execute/import and debug produced sql file by themselves.
Anyway thanks for your work – it is a good start point for my project. Currently I intend to write a PHP script to parse OSIS xml file to a little bit easier data structure (only one table with columns: bibleVersion, book, chapter, versNumber, versContent, comment, crossReferences, strongsNumbers, …)
And about the translation – I am inspired by the authors of CHES (Concordant Hebrew English Sublinear http://www.scripture4all.org/ISA2_help/DatabaseInfo/WLC/CHES.html) and I want to do similar work in czech language.
Have a nice day (and stay tuned
)
Tim Hawes said,
December 8, 2010 at 11:39 am
I apologize for the sparseness of my README. I had not realized I had not left instructions for which SQL script to use first. The parsexml.py script inputs directly into the database, mainly because of MySQL’s lack of use for sequences, which is needed in creating the database data. The script and the database structure are not compatible for importing more than one Bible into the database.
What I need to do is combine the OpenBibleDB.sql and init.sql scripts, and put the chapter and verse number input into that script as well. Then remove the input of those tables in parsexml,py so that multiple versions can be inputed.
I had all this working years ago for PostgreSQL. I even had a python script called osis2sql.py that outputed straight PostgreSQL syntax. But then, lost all my work due to a harddrive wipe. The OpenBibleDB project was started to prevent any further lost work for this project. I still intend on finishing it. Recent time constraints have slowed its progress.